Earlier this year, therapist Michele Weiner-Davis spent hours in front of a camera, her husband patiently hitting the record button as she rehearsed for what she believed could be the most important 18 minutes of her professional career: her first TED talk.

There’s a reason agoraphobic people stay home and acrophobic people stay grounded. No one enjoys the way that panic feels. But the trouble with trying to avoid or get rid of panic altogether is that it can lead to a fear of panicking itself. What panicked clients need from therapy instead, says Reid Wilson, author of Don’t Panic, are skills for engaging with their distress, not new ways to keep avoiding it.

It wasn’t their research results or bestselling books that set apart Freud, Rogers, Minuchin, and Satir. They seemed to have a sense of what really mattered. Today have conceptions about clinical wisdom become obsolete?

 

According to Michael Gelb, a world-renowned speaker on innovative approaches to enhanced learning and author of How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, the key to being a lifelong learner is harnessing the power of neuroplasticity—the ability to make our minds adaptable—by seeking change and exercising the brain. The first step, Michael says, is understanding the relationship between attitude and outcome.

It’s commonly suggested that depression results from seeing reality too clearly. Repression, denial, and humor grease the social wheels and lead us to put a positive spin on the behavior of those around us. This may be why humans have so few networks dedicated to self-insight and so many ways of distorting reality in their favor.

Therapeutic skeptics still cite the possibility of stirring up intense transference and countertransference responses as a compelling reason not to use more body-oriented approaches. But therapists who work somatically maintain that transference and countertransference are no more a problem for highly trained and skilled body psychotherapists than for well-trained talk therapists.

For the couple dropping out of therapy without having faced basic issues in their relationship, the stakes are much higher—more potentially damaging—than losing clients is for me.

It’s an article of faith among many somatically-oriented practitioners that the body knows more, knows it more directly, and expresses it more honestly than does the often muddled, deceitful, and fearful mind.

Most of our therapeutic interventions for anxiety center around managing over-blown feelings of fear. But what if we consider anxiety as a vital signal, alerting us that we are taking actions that do not align with who we truly are?

Recognizing a habit that needs to change is one thing, but finding a way to get your stubborn mind to allow you to make that change is a completely separate challenge.